


Adam Jones at the Langham: The YouTube Channel

by Addison R (beyond_belief)



Category: Burnt (2015)
Genre: Drabble Sequence, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Implied Relationships, YouTube, Yuletide Madness 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21769690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beyond_belief/pseuds/Addison%20R
Summary: Tony suggests Adam film for the restaurant's YouTube channel. This goes about as well as you'd expect.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	Adam Jones at the Langham: The YouTube Channel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



> Dear track_04: I'd heard of this movie but never watched it before reading your letter, and then I saw Daniel Bruhl was in it and was immediately intrigued. Then I was like, "wow almost everyone in this movie is some sort of an idiot" and now I love it.

"I'm a chef, Tony," Adam says, when Tony brings up the subject of posting videos online. "Not a _cooking instructor_."

Tony shakes his head, gestures at the gleaming stoves. "No, you misunderstand. We film you cooking. There is no teaching."

Adam folds his arms, but he doesn't frown or sigh, which Tony takes as a good sign. "I just cook, and don't have to say anything?"

"Not unless you want to say something."

"And there's an audience for this?"

From across the kitchen, David calls, "It's YouTube. There's an audience for everything!", and Tony knows Adam will agree. 

Kitchen staff take bets on how long Adam will last before he starts talking to the mounted cameras. "Five minutes into the first one," David says, putting his five pound note into the carafe they're passing around.

"I think he makes it a whole video, but only one, and begins talking right away the next one," Max says.

Kaitlin adds her fiver. "Five minutes? Try two."

Helene's shaking her head. "He won't last two minutes. I give it thirty seconds before he can't stop himself from talking to the camera."

Tony doesn't bet, but Helene's honestly sounds the most realistic. 

"You're telling me Reece posts these videos online?" Adam asks, making his _you've got to be shitting me_ face.

Tony, as a general rule, does not joke while he's working. "Here. I'll bring it up."

Twenty seconds later, he's pulled up the restaurant's YouTube channel. The header image is of Reece's face - he's unsurprised to see Adam frown at that, even if it is amusing. "He does little lessons," he tells Adam. "They receive a fair number of views."

"We can't do what Reece's doing," Adam says, predictably.

Tony refrains from sighing pointedly in Adam's face. "We're not."

Max is the one to mount camera and lights after dinner service one night, at careful enough angles that there are no glaring reflections off the work spaces. Tony stands to one side and watches Adam look at the ingredients he'd pulled. "Just cook," he says, when Adam doesn't move for nearly a minute. "Don't think about it."

"I have been on television before," Adam mutters. 

"Yes, and it's obvious you're performing. Don't do that. Just cook."

Adam glares at him through the lights. Once, that would have sent a pleasurable frisson down Tony's spine. Now he just glares back. 

Adam is already in the office when Tony arrives on Thursday, watching something on the computer. His face is intent. Tony gives up on his tie for now and walks around the desk to see what it is. It's Montgomery Reece's channel - he should have figured - and on-screen, Reece is explaining _pommes anna_. 

"Who doesn't know what that is," Adam demands.

"Not everyone came of age drunk in a Paris kitchen."

"...fair enough." He drums his fingers on the desk, then his face lights up. "Tony. Let's film me cooking whatever Reece is teaching. But _better_." 

They upload a video of Adam making four versions of _pommes anna_. It gets three times as many hits as Reece's video. He calls Adam to shout incomprehensible things over the tinny speaker while Adam smirks. Tony waits in the office doorway, one hand pointing back over his shoulder at the bustle of the kitchen. "Would you just fuck him and be done with it?" he asks. "I'll wait."

Adam nearly drops his mobile. Then he says, "Fuck off, Monty," and hangs up. "What did you say to me?"

"Do four versions of macarons next," Tony suggests. "He might kill you."

"People are arguing about this on Reddit!" David yells, holding his tablet up above his head. It's after close, yet everyone's lingering. No one wants to say they're waiting to see what Adam will cook next for the channel, but it's clear by the way they keep drifting close to the filming station. 

Tony looks at the screen over David's shoulder. "R-backslash-cookingdrama," he reads. "Jones Versus Reece."

"I will win," Adam proclaims. He sets a ten-kilo bag of sugar on the workspace. 

"It's not a competition," Helene says, rolling her eyes.

"Fuck that it's not." Adam ties on his apron.

The Reddit speculation grows wild after the macarons. Tony has to stop reading, because it's ridiculous, but David announces the various post titles while they have family meal. Max leans close to Tony. "Does Adam even know what Reddit is?" 

"I doubt it." 

"There are polls for what Adam's gonna show Reece up at next," David says. "First: cakes. Red velvet?"

Everyone groans at that. Tony sees Adam scrub a hand over his face. "Chocolate-rye crumb cake," David continues. "Black sesame carrot cake."

"Wait," Adam says. Everyone stops talking, and Max elbows Tony in the ribs. "That could be interesting."

The black sesame cake with citrus curd ends up being eight layers tall. Max rigs a camera to film the oven as the cake rounds bake, and they figure out how to run the video at double speed for the playback and make that part a separate video. It gets a thousand hits overnight. The video of Adam assembling the cake gets two thousand. 

" _can't believe how soothing this is to watch_ ," Tony reads from the comments, then laughs quite directly in Adam's face. "You. Soothing."

"What's Reece teaching?"

"Swiss meringue buttercream." Tony pauses. "Only nine hundred hits so far."

People start mentioning the channel when they make reservations, almost breathlessly. One goes so far as to say he's voted in the Reddit polls, and that while Reece's instructions are valuable to the home chef, there's something oddly pleasant about watching Adam simply cook whatever it is. Gougères. Chateaubriand. 

"Your ridiculous rivalry has garnered a nearly cult following," he tells Adam. 

Adam is sketching how he wants the new dessert cheese plate to be laid out. He pauses. "Is it wrong that I get a perverse satisfaction out of out-performing Reece?"

"I would not expect anything less than your perversions."

Montgomery Reece appears late one night after nearly everyone's left, as Tony's about to lock up the back doors, and Adam's in the office reading a cookbook from 1932. "Where is he?"

Tony points toward the emanating pool of light, the rest of the lamps down low or off.

Reece stomps away. Whatever, they say, it's not loud enough that Tony can hear from the other side of the kitchen. Adam's standing up, and Reece is gesturing. Murder doesn't appear to be on the horizon, so Tony goes to lock up the night's cash. When he walks back, they're gone. 

Adam rolls in ten minutes after his normal time, as Tony hovers in the door way. "I do hope you appreciate that I worry when you're late. I wonder, has he fallen in the Thames? Found some cocaine in the gutter?"

"I can afford slightly better than sewer coke." Adam stops grinning when he sees that Tony's not. "Relax. I went to Reece's. Made bulgogi, actually."

"...for his YouTube channel?"

"You don't see my face. And he hasn't posted it yet, something about something with the video taking forever."

"You're the one who wanted to make it a competition," Tony points out.

Reece must post sometime before dinner service, because David comes back from his break saying something about Reddit that finally reaches Tony two hours later. "Are you simply unable to avoid drama?" he asks Adam, as Adam carefully slides a rose made from whisper-thin dried fig slices onto the cheese plate. 

"Every table is full out there, right?" 

He's not wrong. "Sometimes I liked you better when you pretended to be above catering to the masses," Tony says, although he doesn't mean it in the slightest.

With tweezers, Adam adds several real rose petals. "This is more fun. Service!"

The bulgogi video gets three times as many hits as Reece's usually do. Adam makes pavlova in his next silent post, individual geometric swoops of meringue, fruit sliced to look like leaves and bugs. "Maybe you should try something that's not dessert," Tony says, even as they watch the hit counts tick upwards in the slight lull between lunch service and dinner.

"Maybe I should put pavlova on the menu." Adam twirls his pencil between his fingers, his gaze on some faraway fixed point, his notebook in hand. 

"We're booked for the next three months, why not?"

Adam looks up at that. "Job security, baby!"

Reece posts no new videos for a week, and the Reddit forum is awash in rumour. "Do they not understand the man is running a restaurant?" Tony asks, when he sees Helene and David reading posts after close.

"It's the internet," David says, gesturing as though that explains anything.

"Go home, would you."

Adam appears then, a small tornado, his backpack over one shoulder. "I'm going over there, I'll make sure he's not dead."

"You're - what happened to rivalry?" Tony demands, to Adam's disappearing back. "It was _your_ rivalry!"

Reece must not be dead, because the following morning Tony's phone chimes softly with a notification that Reece's channel has uploaded a new video. It's only five minutes long. Reece's arms and hands are making ridiculously overstuffed omelettes, the decadent sort of thing Tony would expect to get in America. 

There's another set of arms and hands in the video, mostly chopping and at one point sauteing. Tony would recognize Adam's hands - some of those scars are unmistakable - and he does recognize them now. 

"Honestly," he says, when Adam arrives at the restaurant.

"I'm not drunk enough to ruin everyone's lives this time," is Adam's reply, as he nudges on the tap to wash his hands. 

"I do hope not," Tony says quietly. 

Adam leans against the counter. "I just… I need to check, you're not mad that it's not you, right?" The question is uncharacteristically hesitant, which almost makes Tony smile. 

"No. I'm not mad."

"You sure?"

Tony nods. "Quite certain. However, your idiotic YouTube rivalry continues to bring in patrons, so please give it a few months before you merge channels." 

"Merge - _what_?" 

"Months," Tony repeats, pointing at him, before turning on his heel to go check on the dining room.


End file.
